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The number of American workers employed by foreign-owned companies is on the rise, according to the Pew Research Center. And, according to the Business Roundtable, with “more than 95 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of the world’s purchasing power outside the United States, future economic growth and jobs for the United States increasingly depend on expanding U.S. trade and investment opportunities in the global marketplace.”

For this reason, leadership is more complex than ever. The traditional approaches that worked even as recently as a decade ago are proving insufficient for the range and breadth of demands in the new global environment. Global leadership expert and author Melissa Lamson believes it is vital to equip managers with tools and techniques to help them understand their international working environment and the mosaic of individuals within it.

Melissa Lamson is an executive coach, author and speaker specializing in global leadership.The PWP Studio Team

“The new global environment is all around us,” Lamson says. “No business environment is local. We are interacting with people from all over the world, everywhere, all the time . Immigration and globalization trends will not reverse any time soon. Advances in technology further stir the pot, making it more likely that you will have frequent contact with people with diverse norms, perceptions, and values. Our workplaces are increasingly virtual, and we have connection to locations and regions like we never had before. It’s exciting and, at the same time, challenging.”

For over 20 years, Lamson has provided leadership training and executive coaching for aspiring leaders up to the C-level in small, medium and large corporations including Space X, SMA Solar, SAP, and LinkedIn. She helps managers understand the complexity of cross-cultural interactions, providing research and proven methodologies they can implement in their own organizations.

Lamson speaking on the importance of a global mindset in business.Sandra Kush

Here, Lamson offers six tips for successful global leadership:

Adapt your behavior so that it works best with the person or situation you’re facing.

The most effective managers have always been the ones who modified their behavior to fit the situation. Now you have situations that include more and more people with different personal, cultural, and organizational understandings. You’ll do better if you adapt to a behavior that’s likely to succeed rather than expect people to adapt to you.

For example, look at the way individuals are motivated. You might be motivated by making money or moving up the ranks in your organization, but your team members might prefer working with people they consider friends or learning new skills. If you apply your motivators to theirs, you might unintentionally cause disengagement.

You won’t come up with the right behavior or decision just by thinking about it. Be prepared to do something, see if it works, and modify if necessary.

It would be nice if you could follow a recipe for every management situation that you’ll face. Then you’d know exactly what to do. But that’s impossible. You’ll be more effective if you Observe, Ask questions, and then React based on that information – a process I call OAR.

For example, a manager from Japan writes an email to his team in the US every Monday morning with a list of to-dos. He doesn’t expect dialogue or pushback, just execution on the list. The US team feels put off. They would prefer to discuss the list of tasks with their manager in order to feel a sense of collaboration and ownership. The US team accomplishes some of the tasks but not others.

If the manager in Japan just gets upset and sends more lists of tasks, this won’t help. But if he takes a moment, asks some questions about why tasks aren’t getting done and tries to understand the whole picture from the perspective of the US team, then he can react appropriately.

Remember: You make choices and decisions based on your culture, but other people make decisions based on their culture.

Your initial actions make perfect sense to you, but they may not make sense to the person you’ve encountered. They will filter their understanding through their own cultural and experiential lens. Keeping that in mind, figure out what’s going on, then be quick on your feet so that you can adapt effectively.

Get used to being comfortable being uncomfortable.

As you move through your days and your career, you will encounter many situations that are new and puzzling. They’re likely to make you uncomfortable. That’s okay. Take being uncomfortable as a challenge to find the best thing to do.

Use cultural tendencies as a starting point, but treat them as guidelines, not rules.

There is a lot of cultural research out there, but I chose four cultural dimensions for my book, The New Global Manager. Based on my experience, these are most likely to influence your encounters in the workplace. The four dimensions are: thought Patterns; time; communication style; and formality.

Some people like to think about the results first and figure out how to reach them second. Others like to have a more detailed plan in order to reach outcomes. This is what is meant by thought patterns.

There are two extreme dimensions with respect to time: Those who believe deadlines and appointment times are flexible, and those who believe they should be fixed.

Communication style relates to how directly or indirectly a person communicates. If your manager gives you feedback and it feels like a slap in the face, this indicates a direct communication style. If you have trouble understanding what the feedback is referring to exactly, this is an indirect style.

Formality dictates how people feel about and react to hierarchy. This is very important to understand in order to establish credibility as a leader. Some individuals feel a manager is should make all the decisions and deliver bad news. Others feel managers are there simply to facilitate a team of experts and should leave the solutions to the individual team members.

Lamson feels she is totally aligned with her life purpose in her career as a global leadership consultant. She earned a Master’s degree in Intercultural Relations with a specialization in Diversity Management. After three years at a training firm in Boston, she moved to Europe, where she ran two companies focused on intercultural training and diversity management. Since 1998, she has worked on projects in over 40 countries. “I love what I do,” she says. “People implement what I teach, and I get to see and hear from them years later. It is exciting to see others as satisfied and happy with their professional and personal lives as I am.”

Not all companies and leaders understand the value of diversity and investing in people development, however. Lamson says, “There are still many organizations that assume a bunch of smart people will get things done. It’s true they will, but its short-term thinking to believe they can sustain growth without investing in training and development of their people. And with the advancement of technology, empathy, social skills and the ability to influence will all be even more important for individuals in organizations!”

MeiMei Fox is a New York Times bestselling author specializing in health, wellness and positive psychology. As a writer and life coach, she helps people align careers with their life purpose.

I am a New York Times bestselling author, coauthor and ghostwriter of over a dozen non-fiction books and hundreds of articles for publications including Huffington Post, Self, Stanford magazine, and MindBodyGreen. I specialize in health and wellness, spirituality and psycho...